CLEVELAND - His Nazi war crimes case has spanned 27 years, he has been sentenced to death and then freed, and he has twice lost his U.S. citizenship. Today, as he fights the U.S. government's attempt to deport him, John Demjanjuk's case vividly illustrates the enduring grip of World War II, 60 years after the guns fell silent in Europe.

The 84-year-old Ukrainian refugee's case drew international attention 19 years ago when he was extradited to Israel for a trial that included testimony of Holocaust survivors who recalled him as Ivan the Terrible, a sadistic guard at the Treblinka gas chambers. The retired Ohio autoworker was convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to hang.

But in 1993, the Israeli Supreme Court ordered his release based on documents from the Soviet Union suggesting that although Demjanjuk may have been a Nazi guard, the notorious Ivan likely was someone else.

Demjanjuk lost his U.S. citizenship in 1981, got it back in 1998, and lost it again in 2002, when the Justice Department's Nazi-prosecution arm, the Office of Special Investigations, made a case based on war documents linking him to several Nazi concentration camps other than Treblinka, such as Sobibor, Majdanek and Flossenburg. The second case no longer involved allegations relating to Ivan the Terrible.

Eli Rosenbaum, the Justice Department's chief prosecutor of Nazi cases, said the case against Demjanjuk has been a massive undertaking, involving thousands of war documents. Demjanjuk is one of 79 people tied to a Nazi past who have lost U.S. citizenship.

Demjanjuk came to the United States as a refugee after World War II and maintained an unassuming lifestyle while he and his wife Vera raised three children in suburban Cleveland. Now Demjanjuk, who turns 85 in April, has trouble walking and his back hurts when he sits. Family members helped him to stand during the opening hearing of his deportation case Feb. 28.

He maintains he was a Soviet soldier who became a prisoner of war. Demjanjuk's only hope to prove he is a victim of mistaken identity is a pending appeal. His lawyer, John Broadley, argues that a signature on a letter Demjanjuk wrote to his parents in 1941 does not match a signature on a Nazi guard identification card linked to him.